Oddly enough, I’ve been meaning to put this up for over a week. Originally, I was going to wait until I had the book ready for sale, but you know, reality has it’s own agenda. All of a sudden, a bunch of things suddenly erupted onto my schedule like post-rain mushrooms. Given that Smashwords takes a bit of time to publish things, I thought I’d put the teaser up now.

It’s my second book, and this one is in the spirit of Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol. The title is The Ghosts of Deep Time, and the book contains a novel and a short story.

From the back cover:

“A consultant finds a fossilized pack in the desert, then finds himself back in the Miocene with a criminal gang.

A game warden busts a group of trespassing druids in a wildlife sanctuary. They vanish in a green flash and he loses his job, only to be recruited for something much bigger.

This is the big secret: time travel is easy. There are over four billion years in Earth’s past. The deeper one goes in time, the more alien the Earth is. Still, people have settled most of Earth’s history. Of course they live without a trace, for that is the law of deep time. To do otherwise could create paradoxes, bifurcating histories, even time wars and mass extinctions.

Where there is law, there is also crime. When crimes span millions of years, law enforcement takes a special kind of officer. An ex-game warden can be the perfect recruit. At the right time.”

Here’s a sample. Enjoy! The Smashwords version will be available in a couple of weeks, and a paper version will be available through Lulu late next week. I’ll add links as things progress. A couple of you may have seen this already. If so, feel free to comment on it.

Currently Scion of the Zodiac is available at Smashwords (paperback or pdf) and Lulu (many electronic formats). Spreading it more widely is proving interesting. In the coming days, it should make it to Kindle, Apple, and the other big stores. Or you can get those files at Smashwords and save the wait.

If you happen to like science fiction, gardening, friendly dragons, and/or native plants on alien worlds, you might like this book. Check it out.

Note: there are three ways to get it, if you’re interested. One is to buy it, which is always much appreciated. Another is to read and review it for me, which means you get it free if I get your honest feedback afterwards (this is the sweat-equity model). The third way is to be closely related to me, in which case it may just appear on your table some day soon. This is the fun part of being related to an aspiring author.

–I did my third National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) contest, and for the second year in a row, I finished the necessary 50,000 words. Since I started late and had a lot of other things going on, when I was writing, I wrote a lot. This is the start of another science fiction novel, one about time travel and conservation.

–The result of my NANOWRIMO 2009, Scion of the Zodiac is going up for publication. While I’m still shopping it around to see if any publishers want it, I decided to publish it myself and see if anyone liked it. It’s currently available at Smashwords and Lulu. Hopefully before Christmas it will be available at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore as well. The basic idea is that, if a publisher wants to option it, I’ll simply take down the current self-published versions and let them publish it.

Bottom line is: if you want to read science fiction with a large dose of ecology in it, check it out. I’ll post links as I get them.

–The next writing item on my list are those promised blog entries about native plants, to help Mike and anyone else for leading public hikes in the spring. If you have any preferences for topics, let me know.